We know surprisingly little about interpersonal violence in cross-national, comparative context. Owing partly to the difficulties in collecting data that can reasonably be compared, research has tended to focus on stylized facts generated in separate fashion. For example, we know that violence is ecologically concentrated based on numerous, separate studies of American and European cities. But we do not know why. We also know that violence tends to correlate with structural factors such as neighborhood poverty, again in many different cities. Yet we do not know whether concentrated poverty, defined similarly, can explain cross-national differences in violence, nor even how the distributions of inequality directly compare at the neighborhood level. Perhaps more important, when it comes to the social mechanisms that generate or inhibit violence, the limits of our knowledge become apparent. By focusing primarily on correlates of violence at the level of social composition (namely poverty), prior research has tended toward a risk factor rather than an explanatory approach that posits social mechanisms.

Our goal for this essay is to move beyond the dominance of exclusively American studies of interpersonal violence and the canonical correlate of poverty. We do so by addressing the neighborhood social order of interpersonal violence in the contemporary urban settings of Chicago and Stockholm. The move we make is to link comparative measures of structural inequality with community-level mechanisms that are hypothesized to predict violence in similar ways despite vastly different national contexts.